Station brakes: the government's campaign against cable television

Reason, Feb, 1995 by Thomas W. Hazlett

In the international realm, the liberation of America's wireline press has had enormous impact. CNN, the world's first unlicensed, unregulated electronic news network, has destroyed old barriers and erased traditional borders with its low-cost, round-the-clock, real-time access to global events. Not only does CNN bring international news events to millions of Americans, it has injected American influence into the far nether reaches. Boris Yeltsin himself credits CNN's worldwide telecast of his dramatic lecture to the tank commander in the August 1991 coup as the defining moment in the Soviet Union's monumental crash and burn. Now there's a First Amendment value.

Other cable nets have arisen to fill out the program schedule on your local cable television dial, and the diversity of choice is astounding. Try CNBC for a host of political talk shows, including Equal Time--curiously, found on a network with no equal-time requirement. Pozner & Donahue, Tim Russert, and Cal Thomas provide Americans with news analysis from the socialist to the fundamentalist, with a batch of arrogant inside-the-Beltway types tossed in the middle. (Averaging just 173,000 viewing homes per night, the network is run so economically that it will make its owners $25 million this year.) Try Comedy Central for the clever and much-needed Politically Incorrect, Court TV for live coverage of a wide range of fascinating trials, complete with expert commentary. And check out C-SPAN and C-SPAN2 for a phenomenal plunge into wonk-heaven: non-stop, commercial-free public policy. Congressional sessions, think-tank conferences, political speeches, journalist roundtables--even re-enactments of all seven Lincoln-Douglas debates. And it is scrupulously bipartisan; indeed, the network makes repeated use of writers for such disparate think magazines as The Nation and National Review. On one November day, I switched from C-SPAN, televising an analysis of the GOP congressional sweep by political strategist William Kristol and noted political scientist Everett Carll Ladd, over to a hoary dismissal of everything American by the one-and-only Gore Vidal on C-SPAN2. To me, that's entertainment.

Beyond this rich mixture of information and public affairs, a broad range of special interests are also served by the unregulated media. Lifetime is a cable network devoted to women's perspectives, Black Entertainment Television to African Americans, Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Channel to children, Galavision and Telemundo to the Spanish-speaking, The Learning Channel and ME/U (Mind Extension University) to educational programs. Gay Entertainment Television is now available in 7 million of the 60 million U.S. cable homes, and scads of new specialty program services are on the launch pads.

The intellectual establishment in mass communications sees absolutely nothing to cheer about in this phenomenal new diversity. It furiously attacks the growth of the unregulated media, denounces the expansion of viewing choice on cable as so many sitcom reruns and home shopping bazaars, and pens diatribes against the alleged increasing concentration of media ownership. This is appallingly bad scholarship, as even the most casual investigation will show. Indeed, it is on the unregulated media such as C-SPAN that a rabble rouser such as Noam Chomsky roams free to expose the evil conspiracies that lurk all about his world.